Book Review: Olive
18.05.2020
Book Review | Olive by Emma Gannon
After a couple of hefty reads that explored worlds quite different to mine, I was excited for Emma Gannon’s novel, following the story of Olive, a magazine writer and editor who is grappling with the decision of whether or not to have a baby.
I always enjoy sinking into books written by women who understand women. Olive and her closest three female friends have traversed life together since their teens and have that lovely, messy relationship that women can have that’s somehow both complicated and simple at the same time. Despite (or perhaps because of) always having attended all girls schools until university, I struggled when I was younger to create those bonds with women, often opting for what I felt was an easier, less emotionally convoluted friendship with boys. (Yeah, sorry, I was one of those girls.) Somewhere along the way towards growing up though, perhaps as the intricacies of life differed depending on gender, I realised that the majority of my closest relationships these days are with women and that I now crave that female presence in my life in a way I never used to. So really these books that were once aspirational are now cosily familiar and reassuring to read.
Olive is an excellent and pretty relatable protagonist as she’s a wonderful mix of impressive and irritating qualities! She seems to know her own mind pretty well, she’s loyal, ambitious and successful. She’s also an over-thinker, anxious, a little bit stubborn and not aways a great communicator. Splitting between past memories and the present, the novel follows Olive as she interrogates her feelings about having children in the wake of a break-up and all her friends becoming baby oriented. I’m in that exact point in my life now where there’s a small chasm opening up between those with children, those planning to have children and those anticipating staying baby free so it was easy to enter the world of the book.
Gannon doesn’t simply fixate on Olive’s confused state of mind about her own decision to have children but also follows the experiences of her friends who are having different experiences, some already have a handful of kids while one is undergoing round after round of IVF. For me, the most interesting aspect of the book is this interplay between the wants, needs and pain of the four women. Trying to navigate a friend’s inability to get pregnant while still joyfully celebrating the birth of your own child must be a horrible situation to be in and one that many women I know experience. I constantly see well-meaning people sniping at each other for complaining about not having children, having children that are annoying them, accidentally getting pregnant, not being able to get pregnant etc. It’s human nature to be angry at people for not appreciating what you wish you had.
I struggled to connect with the broader discussions of the decisions to not have children. I know that these exist, that people constantly tell women that they’ll change their mind or disagree with their decision to stay childfree, and some of the examples in the books were eye-opening. The book is peppered with quotes from people - both famous and not about their experiences about the decision to be childfree - which worked really well to underline this. These things are irritating and of course should be challenged but I felt that the career-centric, creative world that Olive inhabited (outside of her friendship group) would actually counter this with the positive aspects of being childfree. However I really connected with Olive’s relationship with Jacob as an emotional catalyst for the entire situation. The decision to have children is a very personal one, but to have somehow ended up in a relationship where you’re on opposite ends of the spectrum is heartbreaking. To have her decision making process impacted by such a large potential loss raised the stakes hugely.
Despite loving both Olive and the friendships that underpin the book I became exasperated with some of the behaviour exhibited that didn’t quite ring true for me. While it’s true that life can tear previously inseparable people apart and that everyone can retreat into their own worlds a little bit, I did feel that Olive behaved quite strangely towards her friends and their children. I think her struggle to accept the changes that her friends had made in their lives is understandable but I became infuriated by how childishly she sometimes responded to this, getting drunk at baby showers and withholding important information about her life from her friends. In turn I also felt that, within my own friendship groups, I’ve witnessed a much warmer dynamic. I’ve seen friends with no interest in having children make adaptations to their own lives so friends who do have kids can join in and relationships broaden as new personalities bloom. Of course there’s the aspects where social lives do have to diverge a bit and where situations have been more complicated, but my overwhelming feeling was that Olive made very few concessions towards her friends with kids - making catty comments and rarely showing much interest in these people who were so important to her friends.
These are minor gripes though and the more I read the book, the more I felt like nuanced explorations of the concept of having children came forth. I loved the addition of Olive’s neighbour Dorothy, her sister Zeta and the friend who drunkenly confessed she regretted having a child. I would have loved to learn a bit more about Isla as her backstory and complexities made her fascinating to me. I think this book will really speak to modern women wrestling with a decision that’s still a relatively novel one for the majority of us to be able to make.
Olive comes out in June 2020 | Thank you to NetGalley for an advance digital copy